Laura Jane Grace is guiding me through the discography of beloved UK anarchist punks Crass when security interrupts us. A chocolate Lab starts to sniff around the curtains and scattered Christmas lights that decorate a dressing room in downtown Des Moines, Iowa’s Wells Fargo Arena, where Grace’s band Against Me! will be playing in a few hours. “This is the daily dog sweep,” she explains with a shrug. “2017.” After a few minutes, man and beast leave the room, but Grace is still annoyed by the intrusion. “It’s like that scene in Minority Report where we’re having a conversation, and then all of a sudden our hands are against the wall,” she says. “Talk about your civil rights being taken away.”

Creeping authoritarianism aside, the 36-year-old is in a great mood as she sips fortified water and radiates joy. Soon, she’ll be taking on intolerance and mindless conformity with politically charged punk rock in front of thousands while opening for her teenage heroes, Green Day. “It is never lost on me onstage,” says Grace, considering her enviable current status in rock’s ecosystem. “This is fucking awesome.”

Her positivity is hardwon. As Against Me! honed their raucous punk protests into anthems big enough to play in arenas across the last 20 years, they endured more than their share of narrow-minded backlash. Tires were slashed. Concert merch was doused with bleach. In 2012, things became even more complicated when Grace came out as transgender, going public about her lifelong battle with gender dysphoria. But through it all, they’re still here. A constant in Against Me!’s restless career has been Grace’s impassioned earnestness—personal and political—and that’s also true of their latest album, 2016’s liberated love odyssey Shape Shift With Me.

Wearing a black hoodie and Doc Martens, Grace talks about how this current tour is something of a full-circle moment—her first-ever concert, when she was 14, was a Green Day show. It’s just one of the many autobiographical details she fondly recalls while going through the songs that have inspired her throughout the years, an unpredictable list that ranges from ’80s hair metal to quotidian British rap.

I lived in Fort Hood, Texas. My dad listened to the Beach Boys and Willie Nelson, and Madonna was probably the only other musician I knew. I remember singing “Into the Groove,” and a few years later, I saw Desperately Seeking Susan and was obsessed with it. But I liked “Material Girl” because I thought she was saying, “I’m a Cheerio girl,” and I really liked Cheerios.

When I was 10, I had really eclectic taste. A lot of that was because I lived overseas, without MTV. My father was stationed in Italy in the military. I had no one to feed me what was cool, so I was into Guns N’ Roses and New Kids on the Block and MC Hammer and a lot of ’80s hair bands. But I was never into Mötley Crüe, they never stuck with me.

A lot of it was just picking stuff based off what record cover looked cool. At 8, I got my first cassette, which was Def Leppard’s Hysteria. I was just like, “Oh, there’s a really brightly colored cover with faces screaming at each other.” I also asked for Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch on cassette, but my dad got me Biz Markie instead, so I was really into Biz Markie. And I had Danny Elfman’s Batman soundtrack on cassette too. That was the perfect music to listen to while playing with G.I. Joes, to make it super dramatic.

I moved to Naples, Florida, and by 15 I was into punk: Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, Operation Ivy. Along with the classic punk bands, like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat—all those bands that you get into when you’re first getting into punk.

I also started to veer into the English peace punk scene, including The Feeding of the 5000, Crass’ first record. I used to hang out at our mall a lot and smoke cigarettes outside of the food court, and there was a copy of this album in Camelot Music’s bargain bin for five dollars. I had never heard anything with such vitriol. He was so pissed off, and the politics were so complex yet so simple. They were talking about, like, the Falklands War, which had nothing to do with a 15-year-old kid in Naples. But I understood what they were saying.

At 20, I was married, working as an auto mechanic, and living in Gainesville. I was doing Against Me!, but it wasn’t by any means a full-time gig. At that time, the folk-punk thing was already kind of happening. I’d gotten lots of comparisons to Billy Bragg, but I’d never actually listened to Billy Bragg. So I started listening to him—Workers Playtime was probably my favorite jam of a record out of his catalog—and I was also into the band Young Pioneers, from Richmond, Virginia. I strongly identified with them because they had that “from the South” look, with ball caps and workers’ suits. The politics were really there, too, and I was really into that at the time.

Against Me! on tour in 2001. “We were all excited because it was snowing, being from Florida this was wild to us,” says Grace, seen here on the right. “The tour would end with us getting rear-ended by a semi-truck on the interstate, rolling three times, and landing upside down in a ditch. We all lived but it definitely took the wind out of our sails after what was an otherwise fantastic tour.”

Now I’m full-on in Against Me!, we’re touring lots, and that was around when we put out Searching for a Former Clarity. All of us were super into the Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free because whenever we were touring in Europe that record would be put on after the show, and everyone would dance to it. That song and that record had a profound influence on me—there’s a song off Searching for a Former Clarity called “How Low,” where the vocal cadence is just completely ripped from the Streets song “Fit But You Know It.” That’s like a perfect concept record, and you have to listen to it from beginning to end because it’s telling a story. There’s only been a couple of records ever that nailed that.

I was divorced and single in 2005, and I had gotten over that punk-only mindset and was open to listening to whatever came my way that I just liked. Whatever was good was good.

In 2010, I was in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. My daughter was born in October of 2009, so that was the first year of parenthood, where music was not the thing I was really focusing on, apart from my own band. I had bought a Prius, because we were having a kid, and I remember getting out of my car in L.A. and being like: “Oh, shit. I’ve got an iPhone and a bunch of bad tattoos and I’m driving a Prius and I just moved to L.A. and I have a major-label contract. I’m such a fucking cliché right now.”

That year, went on an arena tour with [Canadian punk band] Billy Talent, and it was like everything I wanted out of an arena tour. It was just amazing, like kids let loose in a candy store. I remember loving Billy Talent II; that record is phenomenal. Maybe it’s because it was Canada and it was pre-dog sweep security times, but they even had someone whose job it was to plan the party after the show each night. So we’d all end up in a room backstage, someone would set up lights and a disco ball, and people would be playing cards, smoking, drinking. Every band on the tour got along and just partied, and it was great.

Grace working on the 2016 album Shape Shift With Me. Photo by Joe Leonard.

Le Butcherettes’ A Raw Youth is so full and fucking rocking and great. In 2015, I was writing and gearing up for recording our newest record, and I was like, “I want it to sound like this.” Her voice is so fucking good. “Sold Less Than Gold” is a great song.

For a couple of years, there was the combination of coming out and of being a new parent. But I had to get back into not letting that slow me down from discovering new music and going to shows, and at this point I feel rejuvenated with a love for music and seeking out new bands.